The McDonald’s in the Olympic Park has 1,500 seats and is the biggest McDonald’s on earth. Let us ignore the cognitive dissonance of McDonald’s sponsoring the Olympics because we have screamed about that. Let us forget other complaints about the Olympics because, with many golds won by Team GB (an acronym that comes with its own nationalist resurgence and exclamation mark), there is obviously no better way to spend our GNP than on making people run around in circles very fast. Except this is a very self-hating McDonald’s which seems entirely in denial about being a McDonald’s. It could even, apart from the golden arches and the uniforms and the menu, be a secret McDonald’s in disguise, home to a gaggle of French resistance fighters, or al-Qa’eda, or yogis.
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Charles Walford
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The Olympic Park is a concrete nightmare with vast skies. It is grey and sad and when the people leave it will be very ugly indeed; never did a place cry out more for a magic thorn bush to grow and smother it, until a handsome prince (not William) comes and does something about it. It has entrances and exits but very few destinations. It is full of people saying, ‘Hello — how are you?’ in the mad way Americans do, until they shoot you in the face. I would have hoped that McDonald’s, which is screamingly camp, would have joyed up the place a little; when I was a child it was the garish clown that rescued every Saturday afternoon. Even its packaging was thrilling — look, paper on a burger! But no. Somewhere in its marketing journey, probably at the point when Morgan Spurlock leant out of his car window and vomited after eating a McDonald’s in Supersize Me, it began to hate itself and decided to become possessed by the spirit of Wallander.
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